PathCom started out as a Photo Sharing service that limited your Social Network to 50 people. (more)

Adrian Holovaty has been too busy with EveryBlock to work on Django itself. But now he has things working so that he'll be back on Django a full day per week. He gives a list of his priorities.

The eight (UN) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions. They have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest. (more)

one part of a Group's Life Cycle (more)

Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz believe that Market Distortion in Education and HealthCare, two growingly-significant sectors of the US economy (alongside government-employment and possibly Leisure - Education Healthcare And Leisure), reduces potential for Innovation, at a cost to long-term GDP. Government distortion affects both the supply and demand sides of both these markets, making it hard to tell what behavior from anyone is rational (Cargo Cult).

Number Two Son had a math problem positing that if you take 4 sequential whole numbers and multiple them together, then add 1, you always get a "perfect square" (number whose square root is a whole number). It played with a couple examples, but didn't prove the general assertion. So I got curious... (more)

Bruce Sterling imagines potential Disruptive Innovation-s in the HealthCare world. Let's consider a few scenarios... Medical Tourism takes off... Alternative Medicine gets serious... Diagnostix "R" Us... Oldsters join the Extropian-s.

Tim Worstall on the Hidden Cost-s of Single Payer HealthCare systems. We're finally getting to where we can start to put these numbers together now. Health care spending in the UK next year will be 9.4 % of GDP and GDP itself last year was £ 1,224 billion (I said I would be mixing and matching years). Add our costs of £31.5 billion for the queues (2.6% of GDP) and we get to 12% of GDP.

Fred Wilson anticipates Network Effect-s in the Disruptive Innovation around Education and now HealthCare. It is likely that we'll be doing more looking and studying and less investing in healthcare for a while (as we did in education). But I'm hopeful that entrepreneurs, industry observers, and of course all of you, will help us develop a thesis that allows us to start investing in healthcare. Like education, it feels like a market where you can make strong returns and also help facilitate important and needed changes.

There has been a lot of Police State crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street activities across the country. (more)

see Universal Inbox, Universal Toolbox, Identity Hub (more)

Jon Udell-adopted term from Microsoft meaning the need for a rich GUI editor for XML Compound Document-s. (more)

Google announced it's killing a number of offerings: Google Wave, Google Knol, Google Gears, etc.

Dave Gray explains the Empathy Mapping process. He focuses here on the context of Business Model exploration: The goal of the game is to gain a deeper level of understanding of a Stakeholder in your business ecosystem, which may be a client, prospect, partner, etc., within a given context, such as a buying decision or an experience using a product or service. The exercise can be as simple or complex as you want to make it. You should be able to make a rough empathy map in about 20 minutes, provided you have a decent understanding of the person and context you want to map. Others have found it good for history students (Educating Kids).

Fred Wilson has a good post/thread on Writing. School teachers (and students, and parents) should read it.

Someone recently voiced the concern to me about "wikis are hard to organize", so in addition to the notes I already have at TeamWiki, I decided to dump a Sample Team Wiki Page List.

Larry Lessig book about Corruption. ISBN:0446576433 (more)

Venkatesh Rao on the evolution of the American Dream (Life Style Paradigm). You can compare Pig Narrative-s on the basis of the degree of prey liberty (or conversely, predator control) they represent, allowing you to plot the evolution over time. If you plot the course of the American Dream through its many rewrites (9 so far by my count, each associated with a major coming-of-age event that defined a generation), you get something like the picture above... Fortunately for the Pigs, Pig narratives are naturally hard to shift. We imprint (Imprinting) on the dominant one during the crucial coming-of-age window of 15-21 say, just as baby ducks imprint on the first thing they see as “Mommy.” And like Mommy Ducks, Pig Narratives are essentially sources of authoritative and trusted parental guidance. Unfortunately for the Pigs, there is also a dynamic which forces rapid shifts despite their best efforts. This is the impact of the defining events for each generation, which provide the motivation and raw material for each rewrite, and therefore constrain the level of spin achievable. For the generations that came of age during the Great Depression or the 2000-01 boom-bust/9-11 period, the pig narrative had to shift rapidly, even with the most creative damage control on the part of the Pigs. Things get garbled during such times, leading to widespread anomie among those waiting and expecting to be programmed by a Pig.

Mind Mapping ASP. (more)

My totally worthless advice on Parent-Hood - see Raising Kids (more)